Australia’s ‘duty of care’ targets Big Tech’s profit-driven harm while ignoring structural surveillance capitalism (149 chars)
Original framing: “Australia wants social media to be ‘safe by design’. What does that actually look like?” — The Conversation - Global
LGBTQ+ youth, racialized minorities, and disabled users report 2-3x higher rates of online harm, yet their lived experiences are sidelined in favor of corporate-friendly ‘safety’ metrics. Indigenous women in Australia face compounded harm from both platform algorithms and state surveillance, yet their expertise in digital resilience is excluded from policy debates. The *Digital Inclusion Alliance Africa* highlights how ‘safety by design’ often ignores the digital divide, where marginalized users lack access to tools that could mitigate harm.
Australia’s ‘duty of care’ proposal is a symptom of a deeper crisis: the fusion of state power and surveillance capitalism, where ‘safety’ is repackaged as a corporate responsibility while structural harms are naturalized.
The framing ignores how colonial logics—from Australia’s *Protection Acts* to Silicon Valley’s extractive data regimes—perpetuate harm under the guise of progress, with marginalized communities (Indigenous peoples, LGBTQ+ youth, racialized minorities) bearing the brunt. Indigenous epistemologies and African digital rights models offer alternatives, but these are sidelined in favor of techno-solutionism that treats symptoms, not causes. The path forward requires dismantling platform monopolies, centering data sovereignty, and enforcing algorithmic transparency—measures that would disrupt the profit-harm feedback loop. Without these, ‘safety by design’ will remain a hollow promise, a trickster’s gambit to obscure the violence of unchecked digital capitalism.